Mobile devices such as mobile phones, smart phones, digital photo cameras, and video cameras commonly have an integrated camera which can be used for optical recognition and translation of texts captured by the camera.
The aforementioned mobile devices may also include dictionaries and optical character recognition (OCR) software stored in memory. These mobile devices may be used to look up words photographed with the camera. Such devices enable the user to capture and translate inscriptions, signs, menus, etc. into the language of his/her choice and sometimes compare them against the notes stored in a database of the device to obtain some information about the word or the object described by the word.
However, among the significant drawbacks of these devices are their low Optical Character Recognition (OCR) quality due to image blur caused by the movement of the camera and their very slow operation speeds when moving along the text, as they are capable of recognizing only photographed text.